SHARE
COPY LINK

TELEVISION

German celebrities gear up for wild wok race

A handful of German celebrities will hurtle down an Olympic bobsled track in modified Chinese woks at the seventh annual Wok World Championship in Germany on Saturday, organisers said.

German celebrities gear up for wild wok race
Photo: DPA

Inspired by a German TV show in 2003, thousands of people each year watch the competitors – ranging from popstars to Olympic winter sports athletes – throwing themselves down the mile-long track at up to 100 kilometers/hour (60 miles/hour) on live television.

“In the last years an average of three million people have followed the event,” spokesman Michael Ostermeier of commercial channel ProSieben told AFP.

Saturday’s competition will include one-man and team races in four-person wok-sleds.

Tour de France cyclist Erik Zabel and Cora Schumacher, wife of Formula One racing driver Ralf Schumacher, are just two of the daredevils who will take to the starting blocks.

“The pilots will have modified soup ladles attached to their feet which will help them to steer the wok,” Ostermeier said.

Previous winning teams include Olympic ski jumper Sven Hannawald and racing driver turned Playboy model Christina Surer.

After excessive advertising caused a Berlin court to rule that the event must be labelled a commercial event, German media have referred to it as the “most dangerous infomercial” of all time.

“In 2007 the singer from the German band Oomph! suffered a severe concussion, after which we decided to introduce weight limits of 130 kilogrammes (287 pounds) for the one-man woks,” Osterman explained, adding that participants also wear protective gear, similar to ice hockey equipment.

BUSINESS

Google News to return to Spain after seven-year spat

Google announced Wednesday the reopening of its news service in Spain next year after the country amended a law that imposed fees on aggregators such as the US tech giant for using publishers’ content.

Google News to return to Spain after seven-year spat
Google argues its news site drives readers to Spanish newspaper and magazine websites and thus helps them generate advertising revenue.Photo: Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD / AFP

The service closed in Spain in December 2014 after legislation passed requiring web platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay publishers to reproduce content from other websites, including links to their articles that describe a story’s content.

But on Tuesday the Spanish government approved a European Union copyright law that allows third-party online news platforms to negotiate directly with content providers regarding fees.

This means Google no longer has to pay a fee to Spain’s entire media industry and can instead negotiate fees with individual publishers.

Writing in a company blog post on Wednesday, Google Spain country manager Fuencisla Clemares welcomed the government move and announced that as a result “Google News will soon be available once again in Spain”.

“The new copyright law allows Spanish media outlets — big and small — to make their own decisions about how their content can be discovered and how they want to make money with that content,” she added.

“Over the coming months, we will be working with publishers to reach agreements which cover their rights under the new law.”

News outlets struggling with dwindling print subscriptions have long seethed at the failure of Google particularly to pay them a cut of the millions it makes from ads displayed alongside news stories.

Google argues its news site drives readers to newspaper and magazine websites and thus helps them generate advertising revenue and find new subscribers.

SHOW COMMENTS